Ch-ch-changes

A lot can happen in 8 months. Shortly after my last post on the day I left HitPoint I was presented with an opportunity to join a new startup in San Francisco working on deep reinforcement learning. Seeing as how I had just left HitPoint to finish up my PhD in reinforcement learning, and was a bit anxious to get out of western MA after so many years there, it wasn’t something I could easily pass up, despite the fact that it would mean having a full time job again while trying to find time to finish my dissertation. And so, after receiving a job offer, I packed up and moved out to SF in June.

I’ve liked living in San Francisco a lot so far. The weather is probably the biggest plus for me, with the metropolitan culture a close second. It’s great to be able to walk to most of the places I need to go in under 20 minutes year round without needing a winter coat or profusely sweating. The cost of living is definitely the worst aspect. My rent more than quadrupled moving out here, but I did manage to find a nice one-bedroom in a high rise just a five minute walk from my new office.

My new position is Research Engineer at Osaro, Inc. We’re developing deep reinforcement learning tech that we plan to apply to difficult real-world problems (e.g., robotics), so that our clients can reap the benefits of recent breakthroughs in machine learning. Our solutions are in the same spirit as some of the work being done at Google’s DeepMind, with notable differences that I’m not currently at liberty to divulge. 🙂 I’m very excited to be a part of this team, and I think we’ll be making big waves in the machine learning and robotics community in the next couple of years. It’s great to be back in the machine learning game and making use of all the knowledge I gained during my doctoral research.

Speaking of which, as expected, having a full time job immediately after leaving my previous one didn’t do much to help with finishing up my dissertation. Although I didn’t finish up this summer as I had hoped, I’m happy to say that just last week I successfully defended my thesis and can now legitimately ask to be called Dr. Vigorito. It’s a great feeling to have that accomplishment under my belt, and even greater to be able to move on to new and exciting things. It was a long time coming, especially given my five year hiatus, but it’s finally done.

So yea. 2015. New job. New city. New degree. Lots of changes. I’m looking forward to all of the exciting changes in 2016.